You are the Dragon Commander. Your mission it is to reunite a broken empire and become the new emperor. Success depends entirely on your ability to efficiently rule your empire, build invincible armies and lead them to victory.

Reviews

"Divinity: Dragon Commander came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite games of the year. Swift, brutal dragon combat paired with large RTS battles works way better than I ever expected it to." - 8/10 - Venturebeat

"Proper strategy, like mama used to make... its loveable nature and repertoire of charming tricks absolutely wins the day." - Rock Paper Shotgun

"Larian has created a unique, engrossing combination of strategy, political choice and rapid battlefield command." - 8/10 - Incgamers

About This Game

You are the Dragon Commander. Your mission it is to reunite a broken empire and become the new emperor. Success depends entirely on your ability to efficiently rule your empire, build invincible armies and lead them to victory. Your secret weapons: your tactical insights, your leadership skills and your ability to turn yourself into a dragon.
Dragon Commander is not just any strategy game - it seamlessly blends real-time strategy gameplay with turn-based campaigning, role-playing an ascending emperor and controlling a formidable dragon.

Key Features

Real time strategy: Command your sea, land and air forces in real-time. Combined operations and knowing where and when to hit are crucial elements of any victory.

Dragon Combat: During real time strategy mode, you can turn into a dragon to support your troops in combat and obliterate the enemy using your formidable dragon powers.

Turn based campaign: Direct your conquest on the turn-based world map; plan several moves ahead, build formidable armies and invest in the right technology or magic upgrades.

Rule your empire: You are the emperor and you make the decisions! But beware, political balance is easily upset. Each game is different and you'll find that a Dragon Commander needs to make really tough decisions. Feel the effects of your decisions on the battlefield as the war progresses.

Single-player, multiplayer and co-op modes: Play the single player story-driven campaign or test your mettle against other Dragon Knights, online or local via LAN. Start your own multiplayer campaign with or against a friend. Or duke it out on a skirmish map.

Pros:-Politics:This game has an extremely good politics system in place where you can make decisions that effect not only individuals but entire races as a whole. This phase is easily the best part of the game, it is well voice acted, well animated, and provides great enjoyment for most.

Cons:-Map phase:The map phase is shallow to say the least, here you can play cards that improve empire related things, or build buildings that will allow you to improve income and recruit units or mercenaries. But that is all, there is nothing more here, no diplomacy, no trading, nothing that would make you want to spend time strategizing here.

-Combat:This should be the most interesting part of the game, since this is the part where you get to be the dragon...for about 2-5 mins. Here are the problems with this phase:First the design choices, as in the way the units look, they are not only quite small(can't zoom in enough), but also look the same for all factions.

Second, the speed of the combat is waaaaay too fast, if you want to play defensively, you are screwed, you want to build up bases, you are screwed. The only way to win is if you blob all over the enemy at the start of the battle in which case the battle ends rather quickly because if your draw it out, the enemy becomes too strong and usually you can no longer overwhelm them before you run out of resources, enjoy your 5 mins long battle without strategies and being the dragon for about 5 mins. This problem however also relates to being the dragon.

Third, the dragon is strong at the beginning, but if you try and draw out the match to enjoy some base building, you will quickly find, that your dragon is becoming more and more useless as time passes on, since the enemy is improving their units all the time, they will take more hits and you will take less, in the end you will die extremely quickly, making becoming the dragon rather useless.

Fourth, the units have way too many skills you can't micromanage on the same level as the ai, which can make some fights rather one sided.

Fifth, and this is the largest problem with the combat by far. Mercenary cards. Why in the world would you even want to enter combat with such bad mechanics behind it when you can simply bypass it by spamming inns and mercenary cards and than using auto-combat?

-The length of the skirmish matches:These only take anywhere from 25(min difficulty)-45(max difficulty) mins. I tested this by using only mercenary cards and lol i won all of my matches against highest difficulty ai in 45 mins max. This is a joke. Mercenary cards shouldn't be in the game or should be better balanced.

-Story:What story? You mean the few cutscenes we get?The campaign can be completed in about 2-3 hours, which is extremely short for a game like this. The enemies are quite generic, have no personality, don't taunt you and pretty much act the same on the battlefield, or at least i haven't noticed that they did anything differently from eachother.

To sum it up, the devs created a great politics mechanic in the game, unfortunately the game fails at the other parts, and for the title dragon commander, i was expecting to see more dragons or at least more often than about 2-5 mins in combat. I have the feeling that if they went with the original concept, instead of remaking the whole game halfway through in a single year, they could've achieved more, alas, it is not so.

Do i recommend this game for the current price(40eur)? NOThis game is not worth 40 eur.But i do recommend you pick it up when it is on offer.The game is worth about 15-20 eur, carried by the politics and the multiplayer may give you a few hours of amusement.

I recommend this only with a big caveat: you'll like this game if you're willing to appreciate what it could have been, rather than what it really is. I found myself enjoying the game's core concepts enough that I could overlook a lot of the poor execution, but not everyone will have the same experience.

First off, the bad. The RTS gameplay, which forms the bulk of the game's combat systems, is a mind-numbing clickfest of swarming units around. Everything you own dies almost instantly, to the point where it feels pointless to try to micromanage your units, or even use them wisely - it becomes about trying to get the largest horde and throw it at your enemy's weakest points. Playing across the Risk-like metamap can be a tedious slog if you're waiting around to build units, and auto-resolve usually loses you far more units than necessary. I gambled with a direct strike across the entire map to my enemy's capital in the final stage because I couldn't stand the thought of grinding away at his territory for another several dozen turns; under-prepared and outnumbered, I had to fight that last battle about 10 times before winning, but it still felt worth it to not have to play the metamap anymore.

On the other hand, being able to transform into a dragon in the RTS battles is fun, especially since, after some practice, it becomes possible to win battles that are almost entirely in the enemy's favour by judicious dragon use (I easily won battles that the game's auto-resolve system gave me a 90%+ chance of losing). This ultimately ends up defeating the purpose of the RTS gameplay, though it's still pretty fun to play around with. One thing that annoyed me was the realization that the only reason the dragon is not totally invincible is because enemy projectiles will home in on you, forever, from across the entire map, which feels like a cheesy design solution.

The story, politics, and RPG elements that occur between battles on the command ship are where the game really shines. The characters are surprisingly well voiced, the art style is excellent, and the storyline and dilemmas are quite compelling, both on their own as well as in terms of their impact on the game. It's sad to see how an excellent RPG/strategy hybrid is hiding in there, barred from becoming as good as it could be by mediocre RTS design. Another six months of polish and design work could have made a world of difference.

Of all the games that I have played, the game that probably did the best at challenging my ethics was Divinity: Dragon Commander. Admittedly, the gameplay is lackluster in both the strategy and combat phases; it was not long before I habitually skipped tactical battle for auto-resolution. But where Divinity: Dragon Commander really shines is in the diplomacy phase – the phase of each turn where you take a step back from world conquest to deal with management of your empire through the enacting of laws and policies. Your empire has racial factions, each with their own dominant political, social and religious sensibilities. Sure, their representatives are largely caricatures of modern political stances, but they still manage to bring arguments to the table that push you to evaluate your choices.

Every decision will have consequences – in the very least, they will alter how favorably each faction views you, and can have other (sometimes quite unexpected) impacts as well. Displease the dwarves too often, and you might find your royal coffers running on empty. Make the imps happy enough, and they’ll offer up the opportunity to gain a fantastic and horrible new bomb… if only you’ll allow them to mine in the one place where the mystical material they need can be found (despite, you know, the whole “sacred elven burial site” nonsense). Divinity: Dragon Commander was surprisingly good at making me examine if and when I would embrace practicality or expediency over my personal sense of right and wrong.

The diplomacy phase also includes dealing with your military generals, each of which bring their own personalities, problems and histories to the war room. In addition, you will enjoy a diplomatic marriage that will bolster your approval rating, at least initially, with one of the races; but your wife adds an entirely new substory to navigate through, with multiple possible outcomes.

The diplomacy phase of this game is rich enough to not only play the game for, but to replay it until you have exhausted all the diplomatic possibilities. And since maintaining high enough favor with a faction will open up surprising new avenues, there is a lot of possibilites to explore and enjoy.

This game tries to do too much, but that gives it a certain amount of charm. The RTS is pretty simple, and bum rushing is basically the only strategy you need. Being able to turn into a dragon adds the needed fun action you need to keep it interesting. The Risk-like stragey board is servicible. The star atraction here is interacting with the characters on your ship. Reminiscent of the adventure game ship stuff from Starcraft 2, except here Dragon Commander actually comes out on top. The choices you have have little impact on gameplay, but just getting the reactions from the characters is worth it. The writing and voice acting is all pretty good. I wish there was a little more to the campaign mode, but the weird variability with the wives provides some replayability. I reccomend this game if you're looking for some adventuregamey character stuff and aren't too bothered by shallow RTS gameplay.

While i haven't experienced online multiplayer, i can say that the singleplayer storyline is worth it on its own; the RTS elements may be considered weak as there is only one "faction" as such when it comes to units; and most of the units fall into basic and uninteresting roles; this is but one part of a much larger and more intracate strategy game.

Larian's problem is that they're too unfocused and it makes them often lose sight of the project they're working on. They seem to get bored and then begin other projects to leave unfinished. Then some of those projects get mooshed into one game. I don't think they've made a fully realised game since the original Divinity.

So, how does that apply here?

First of all, let's consider that the original concept for this game was actually very different than what we ended up with. There's a lot of evidence to support this.

1.) Their Kickstarter described a game devoted to dragons and aerial combat. It was to be an apology to those dragon fans who'd bought Divinity II for how badly they were screwed over and let down. Furthermore, the media (such as trailers and screenshots) released at the time depicted proper aerial combat, along with unique art assets for enemy forces, enemy flying bases, and flying base combat that never made it into the final game. It gave the idea of an aerial combat MOBA with dragons, which was a brilliantly original idea to be sure.

2.) The concept art for the game shows dragon forms for the various characters who were kludged into your crew as generals. They were supposed to be leading their own forces, as the generals of the diplomats you're dealing with.

3.) The AI behaves like a MOBA. It hangs around out in the middle of nowhere just to give you something to fight (jungling), and when it's not doing that it strictly follows preset paths in big blobs. This isn't even remotely like how an RTS AI is supposed to work, and it doesn't play like any RTS I've ever experienced. It definitely acts like a MOBA in which you were supposed to play a champion (dragon). Yet the end result of the switchover to RTS makes the dragon pointless (I'll come back to this later).

Thus I believe at one point Larian were distracted from creating the game they wanted to make by starting a number of side projects. Such as the 'Risk clone,' the 'card game,' and 'diplomacy.' I've used quotations because it is to laugh to actually consider them to be such (I'll come back to that later, though).

And each of these projects ended up grossly unfinished, with some having barely any work done on them at all.

Of course, once Larian was done being distracted by experimental shinies, they realised that all of these ambitious projects could never be realised. This included the dragon aerial combat MOBA depicted in their Kickstarter. What to do? They didn't have the assets necessary to actually create their MOBA now, so they ham-fisted whatever they had together and called it done.

Worse than that? They even lost sight of what they were actually making: A game about ruddy dragons! It's a game called 'Dragon Commander' where you don't ever see any dragons -- including your own!

Yet this is what Larian is known for. Losing focus, lazily slapping together something, then merrily dropping it into the market hoping that people will be stupid enough to just buy it sight unseen. They did the exact same thing with Divinity II. THis is what they do.

That, and they just make so many promises that they never, ever keep. How is their reputation not utterly destroyed by this point?

Really, all they had to do was make an aerial combat game about dragons. Instead, they've ended up with what feels like a compilation of bad shareware/home computer games from the '90s, all slapped together into one package that they've very optimistically overpriced. And anyone who's played budget games from that era knows what I mean -- lazily made, unfinished, shallow, uninspired, aggravating, and borderline unplayable cash-ins. That's Larian to a tee, but I gave them the benefit of the doubt. That's on me. I was stupid. Never again.

It's a shallow, binary, yes/no, choose your own adventure sort of affair. It lacks subtlety, nuance, and imagination. It's funny at times, but that's the only virtue it has. Instead of being able to posit your own ideas, instead of debating and politicking to change a proposed bill, you become the voting public embodied in one, tyrannical instance. I didn't want any of that. If you're going to offer me diplomacy, offer me diplomacy! What we got was tyranny.

If you're looking for this sort of thing, I'd recommend looking elsewhere. Any Choose Your Own Adventure book does it better. Try Lone Wolf, or Fighting Fantasy, or even the entirely free Choice of Dragon, which is written much more eloquently and humorously than Dragon Commander could hope to be.

Uninspired.

You can play Risk! Woo! ...except no.

It's a completely one-dimensional affair about the basic micromanagement of units and resources. There's no real strategy involved either beyond brute-forcing your way through the map. This isn't even Risk, it's too oversimplified and one-dimensional for that.

Lazy.

You can be a dragon! So awesome! ...except no.

You have to micromanage everything so if you take your eyes off your units for a moment they're probably going to be doing something painfully stupid (thanks AI). And the enemy forces progress so quickly that they gain weapons and units that can quickly destroy your dragon whilst resisting any damage it could otherwise do, thus rendering the presence of the dragon completely redundant.

Pointless.

You can play a card game! Neato! ...except no.

The cards don't really have much of an affect on anything. You can completely ignore them and still easily beat the game. They're almost entirely cosmetic, essentially only tickling your resources or units, hardly altering them in any meaningful way.

Crap.

You can play an RTS! Rad! ...except no.

The only viable strategy is to create a lot of units and send them in one giant blob to your enemy's base, which results in an immediate victory as the AI is flummoxed by this tactic. I'd hardly call that strategy. Strategy involves... well, strategy!

It feels like the enemy AI was expecting to have a dragon of its own protecting it, which is also suggested by skirmish mode where you pick a dragon type for your AI enemies but they never actually use it. I believe Larian has even admitted to dropping the ball on this one.

So, ultimately...

It's a pretty game, yes. But it's all style and absolutely no substance at all. When you play the game, it really does feel like a bad shareware compilation. It leaves an unpleasant aftertaste in your mouth. You'll feel entirely ripped off by the price they're rather optimistically asking for it.

It's got the depth of toilet paper, and the general design ineptitude of a bad movie tie-in. It's not fun to play, unless your idea of fun is driving a nail into one of your eyeballs. Yes, at first, it'll wow you with its graphical flair, but that's all it has. And that's not worth the entry price. Not remotely. Dragon Commander is a game that looks good until you actually play it.

I find myself wishing they'd stuck with the original idea, which was brilliantly unique and could've ended up being one of the best dragon games on the market. As it is, the amount of 'dragon' in Dragon Commander makes it entirely disingenuous to even call it such. It feels like false advertising to me. A bit of a con, if you will.

If you're buying this because you're looking for a dragon game? Trust a fellow dragon fan -- save your money. I know that us dragon fans have been longing for a game for us, but this isn't it. This is just an effort to take advantage of us by selling us a shareware compilation disguised as a dragon game. That's the most uncool thing anyone could do, really. And I certainly won't be buying from Larian in the future. I've learned my lesson.

May be not a blockbuster, but a solid 7/10 game. There is some story (good looking, but not engaging enought to replay with different outcomes), some strategy (5/10 sadly) and (surprise!) some dragon flying (selling point here). Some parts could have been better, but a decent way to pass a weekend.

I recommend this only to the extent that you pay no more than $15 for it. This game has high production values and is very polished, but it is a very very short game. There just isn't enough content. I beat the single player campaign in 12 hours on my first try on normal. There are a couple game mechanics quirks that you can exploit to make the game a breeze once you learn them.

There seems to be a push to have you play multiplayer but this isn't a popular enough game to really find others to play with. The RTS controls are mostly primitive, and dragon form doesn't really last long enough (and isn't really effective enough) compared with RTS controls to really be a big part.

That said, I still give it a thumbs up because the dialogue is witty, the voice acting is well done, the world is refreshing, and there are innovations here that I enjoy. It just all ended too soon. I have a general rule - each dollar of a game should last me at least 1 hour, so a $40 game should give me at least 40 hrs of enjoyment to be worth the price. This game is therefore a "thumbs up" at about $10-15, but not a good value after that. I will try the custom maps and maybe change my review, but given that the best part of this game is not empire management and combat, but the characters and politics engine, it really is a better fit as a single player, story-driven game.

Very very minor spoiler here: I sent two NPCs on a mission and they don't like each other. Upon their successful return, one said of the other "There must be some brain cells left 'neath that simian cranium of his afterall - holding on for dear life I expect."

There are a great deal of very unique and well differentiated characters and personalities here. There are a lot of cliches like 'greedy dwarf' or 'nature loving elf' but the execution makes this game stand out.

8/10Great game if you wanna make your own decisions, you don't get the feeling that the decisions you are making its pointless, since you gain or lose something doing the coming rounds.Great graphings this game just cool look [which is one of the major reasons why i bought this game ]a lot of maps and a lot of ways to fight them, you can fight battle with your generals, dragon form or your commander form.This game is very short, i went and conquered all the land before moving on and yet it took me about 18 hours to finish it, i played once again with another wife/queen and that is the only reason i would play this game more then once.what i mean is once you finish it once, there is nothing to do but change wife/queen, and of course change your decisions. [ 75% of the time i ended up picking the same ]

Divinity: Dragon Commander is mostly about politics. If you're looking for a good RTS game then stay away. Get something like Company of Heroes or Age of Empires instead.

The campaign in the game is quite short. It took me 8 hours to finish my first playthrough on normal. The game does, however, have a lot of replay value. This is thanx to the politics system: It mostly adresses a lot of nowadays matters and you can choose what laws to pass and what to disgard. For an example: Legalise gay marriage, weed, let women vote etc etc. There are also 4 different prides you can choose to marry and demon offers you can choose...i know i'm gonna experiment with different choices in my 2nd and 3rd playthrough. I want to see how they all play out and what is the best way to get lots of approval from all races.You can be downright sexist, evil or whatever.

The game has an excellent voice acting and this makes meddling with politics such a bliss. Each character is perfectly voice acted and this was the first thing that caught my attention in the game.

The only con with this game is that the battles suck. They are mostly 5-10 minutes long and there's no strategy involved. You quickly realise that in order to win battles you just have to charge at the enemy base immediatly. If you try to build bases, gather armies then you'll just lose because the enemy gets stronger with every second and will eventually become unbeatable.Being a dragon won't help either. Your dragon will be overpowered in the first 2 minutes but gets super weak after that. You will only stay alive for a minute and then wait for respawn. That is why you have to charge at the enemies immediatly... - The strategy in the RTS battles is none existant and is a big dissapointment.That is why i auto resolved most of my matches.

This is a game for people who like to make decisions and meddle with politics, not for the fans of RTS battles.

If you're like me and want to see all different outcomes of the decisions you can make then the game is surely worth it's full price. If you, however, will only play through it once then you'll be highly dissapointed in the 6-9h campaign and should wait for at least a 50% discount.

This game does a lot of things that I like, but falls a bit short for me, since I'm not a huge RTS buff.

Macro level (world map, outside each RTS encounter) movement/production is rather superficial. This is fine if you're mostly interested in the RTS, but less cool if you tend to prefer strategic depth like me.

This is a good game. The RTS is fun, and gathring recruits (resources) to build units is handled well. The units themselves are quite nice. The turn-based part is cute, as all of the people working for you have things to say. There are Generals, Politicians, an Engineer, a gnarly old Wizard and eventually a Princess to marry. You get to make decisions that have far reaching repercussions.

The graphics are nice and the music is also pretty good. The music changes from turn to turn. The story itself is neat. Most RTS just put you on a map and say 'go conquer'. In Dragon Commander the story is half the fun!

I played on casual my first time through and it was a ton of fun. Flying the Dragon is neat. Pretty good game.

Being a dragon in an RTS/RPG is really neat. Graphics are good. Stories and characters are enjoyable. Not too cartoony/hokey either. I like the handling of military and political issues. Early on I find it difficult to manage gold wisely buying troops vs. having a reserve to pay your generals if you happen to need them. I really enjoy the many mini-video clips to show you how different units and abilities works so you can better understand them before you invest in them. That greatly reduces the trial & error aspect of skill trees of these kinds of games.

The voice of demon Corvus (Alastair Parker) sounds very similar to The Mouth of Sauron (Don Messick) in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King movie.

I do wish that homosexuality wasn't as significant of a political theme - I'm barely into Act 2 and already have had like 4 turns of NPC dialogs about the issue. Political issues are understandably familiar so that you can get into it more easily. Realistically any political decision you make will thrill and anger a portion of your population. Dealing with religious zealot Undead, hippy eco-communist Elves, greedy capitalist Dwarves, elitist Lizardmen, and ... (something I haven't quite figured out) Imps can wear you down if you just care about conquest and not governance. Your decisions do affect bonus and penalties in the RTS part of the game.

So far the only replayability of this game lies in different role-playing choices of your wife, different decisions on political issues, and different levels of cooperation with the demon Corvus.

Fantasticaly stasfiying game.Its a mix of an RTS + Risk + PoliticsThe RTS is kinda lacking and end game is a little frustrating,But the Risk part of the game is solid,And the Politics of the game, is great, its a benifit to gameplay,and I really felt like a lord of a fledling nation talking to these high ranking representatives,and it felt good.

Turn based strategic map,Real time Strategy battles, Politics which matter.

Divinity: Dragon Commander is all about planing ahead in order to regain a lost empireakin to RISK you gain cards which benefit you or puts your enemy in a bad placeinteractions with your generals and ambasadors makes for great fun and entertainment outside battles

oh right you also happen to be a dragon who can enter the battlefield should you wish to do so

Everything except the combat in this game is really nice. I actually like the strategic game board more than most other games I've played, and the dialogue and characters all have voice acting and at least some amount of characterization, which is pretty nice.

The actually battles, which unfortunetly are a large part of the game, have a user interface ad overall setup that is frankly unpleasant to deal with and not fun at all.

Here are a brief list of the pros:-The dragon transformation works well and playing in dragon form is pretty fun. The transition between normal rts mode and dragon mode is mostly seamless. Given that this is a major differentiator between this and other games I do have to give some props.-The unit effects are pretty nice. General graphics are good.

The cons (mostly interface related):-Scrolling is a pain, because the map orientation doesn't change with the camera rotation. You can't use the minimap because up becomes down, sideways, and every direction in between, and it is almost impossible to keep track of what else is going on when units that look like they are coming from below your base are actually up and to the left.-The above minimap issues make it very difficult to form strategies and think about what is going on, because unit and base positions are so difficult to keep in mind.-Units that are moving towards enemies will not fight back unless explicitly told to. This is actually pretty common among strategy games, and it wouldn't be a problem except that there is no obvious visual indicator to say that a unit is attacking or just moving near an enemy. It is possible to lose whole armies because you clicked near an enemy instead of on them. Attack moving is a partial solution, but unit attack ranges are so long that parts of your army can get caught attacking non-critical targets on the way to a fight.-Unit movement is slow and feels clumsy. I guess it is more "realistic," but not my cup of tea.-Controlling your units in dragon form becomes even more difficult. With certain hotkeys it is possible to control your nearby units, but it feels really clumsy and there are no visual indicators to tell when units are moving or not. It is difficult to check on your units in dragon form because your camera is restrained to your moving first person view.-Probably the worst part of the dragon form controls is that you cannot produce new units while in dragon form. You are forced to either create long queues of units to make (which you often don't have the resources for) or switch between being a dragon and scrolling back to your base to issue more commands (using the mouse because the minimap is impossible).-Somewhat minor, but the hotkeys are a little strange. Q is the attack hotkey, not A, etc.-Obviously the AI has none of these problems. This creates frustrating situations where the AI is attacking on two or more fronts and you can't even issue commands to your units because the controls are so clumsy.

All these may seem minor but they really build up. It's a shame because the game is almost really good, but it just isn't fun because of all the issues in the actual implementation. I might try to play the game a little more, try to figure out the controls and see if that helps any, but I doubt it. It doesn't feel like the commitment will be worth it when there are simply more fun games out there.